Something to Declare - Review

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1999 by Steven G. Kellman

Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez / Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1998, pp. 312, $19.95

(**) Good The form that Julia Alvarez was handed after a visit to her native Dominican Republic required travelers to specify occupation. When she scrawled in "writer," a customs officer asked: "What have you written? Anything I've heard of?" Under 30 and unpublished, Alvarez replied, "Not yet."

Two decades and six books later, Something to Declare serves to affirm Alvarez's assertion of vocation. The volume brings together 24 personal essays that constitute the artistic credo of an author whose fiction and poetry already speak for themselves. Many now have heard of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and !Yo! (1997).

Alvarez confesses fondness for gossip, and Something to Declare imparts innocent intelligence about its twice-divorced author, now married to a doctor from Nebraska. Her conflicted impulse toward revelation, she explains, derives from a Latin culture that cherishes storytelling, but also demands reticence in well-bred daughters. The chatter of family maids most helped her find her narrative voice.

Alvarez was 10 when, in 1960, her physician father, who had plotted against dictator Rafael Trujillo, fled to the U.S., upending the stable, privileged lives of his wife and four daughters. "When we landed in New York City, we became spics who spoke English with an accent." She relates the stow, told in supple American English, of how, after being wrenched from her native Spanish, she eventually finds a home in the language of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston. When an adolescent romance disintegrates for lack of Spanish to sustain it, Alvarez realizes that English has become the medium of her most vital dreams.

Alvarez credits her career to the creative alienation of exile. "To this day, after three decades of living in America," she concedes, "I feel like a stranger in what I now consider my own country." That estrangement, and the loss of what she calls her "golden handcuffs," forced Alvarez to reinvent herself, as a writer, in language that is more striking for having been painstakingly acquired.

(**) Good

STEVEN G. KELLMAN

Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio